NCAA scoring system unfair

Ask any college basketball or football fan to give you the top five teams in the sport and the fan will usually be able to produce a reasonably accurate answer.

But it's a little more difficult to tell exactly who are the best squads in lesser-known sports - such as track and field. Although the Associated Press doesn't rank the nation's best track teams, and CNN/USA Today doesn't sponsor a coaches' poll as they do for football and basketball, the sport does have one outlet which compiles mid-season rankings - Trackwire.

The Michigan women had a memorable indoor season, capping it off with a Big Ten team title. Katie McGregor, as well as Michigan's distance medley - of which McGregor was a member - won individual NCAA championships as well. The Wolverines finished fifth as a team.

And to reward the Michigan women's track team for the success it's had this year, the latest release from Trackwire has it ranked No. 25.

No. 25? Why? Where's the respect for Michigan, the Big Ten champion?

The truth is, the results from the NCAA Championships at the end of the season are just as unreliable.

There is a lack of parity in collegiate track, and the Wolverines must learn to deal with the unavoidable. Schools in some parts of the country are fortunate enough to be able to train outdoors year-round, while others must resort to cramped indoor tracks with subpar surfaces.

There is also inequality in the way meet scoring affects results, and this is what needs to be changed. In meets such as NCAAs, individual first-place finishes are rewarded with 10 points, just as they are in invitationals. There is no team competition; a team earns as many points as its individual qualifiers combine to earn.

So a large amount of points earned by individual winners can severely impact team scores - to the point where one multi-event athlete can defeat an entire team by herself.

Such a faulty scoring system had a dampening effect on the Wolverines at nationals. Michigan's steady, consistent performers who did not qualify individually were not allowed to compete, when they could've made a contribution in a more equitable team-scoring environment. Instead, one superstar held the power to vault her team's name onto the leaderboard, despite the fact that she was her school's only representative.

The Michigan High School Athletic Association, which governs high school sports in the state, has recognized a similar problem within wrestling and implemented changes. Now, individual and team qualifiers compete on separate weekends to ensure that team results are not skewed by individual performances.

In track, this is not possible. Already, athletes struggle to stay sharp for the two-week period that encompasses their conference championship and NCAAs. Forcing them to change their training schedule would have a deadly effect on the quality of performances in all three meets.

This problem can be solved. Teams that qualify for NCAAs should be permitted to send two representatives from each event to compete alongside the individual qualifiers. After the meet has been scored and the individual results have been totaled, the meet should be rescored excluding the individuals. Both groups of runners will thus have the chance to compete at the same meet, and the goal of determining fair team scores is achieved.

The NCAA must recognize this as soon as possible, or it will continue to disappoint more and more deserving track teams every year.

04-16-98